ice--reappeared to me. You remember the Nichols thing--boloed in
the dark between my town and Himamaylan. His _muchacho_ had jumped into
the ditch. Afterward he got out and ran back the whole way, fifteen
miles, to my place. I started down there. My idea was to pick up Miller
as I passed, then Dent a little further down, find the body, and perhaps
indications for White of the constabulary, to whom I had sent a
messenger and who could not reach the place till morning. Well, Miller
refused to go. He had caught hold of some rumor of the happening; he was
barricaded in his hut and was sitting on his bed, a big Colt's revolver
across his knees. He would not go, he said it plainly. 'No, seh; Ah
cain't take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' He said this without much
fire, almost tranquilly, exactly as he had, you remember, at the time of
our shipwreck. It was not so amusing now, however. Here, on land, amid
this swarming, mysterious hostility, at this crisis, it seemed a
shocking betrayal of the solidarity that bound all us white men. A red
rage took possession of me. I stood there above him and poured out
vituperation for five good minutes. I found the most extraordinary
epithets; I lowered my voice and pierced him with venomous thrusts. He
took it all. He remained seated on his bed, his revolver across his
knees, looking straight at some spot on the floor; whenever I'd become
particularly effective he'd merely look harder at the spot, as if for
him it contained something of higher significance--a command, a rule, a
precept--I don't know what, and then he'd say, 'No, Ah cain't; Ah cain't
affawd it.'

"I burst out of there, a-roar like a bombshell. I rode down to Dent; we
rode down to the place and did--what there was to be done. Miller I
never wanted to see again.

"But I did. Some three weeks later a carrier came to me with a note--a
penciled scrawl upon a torn piece of paper. It read:

"'I think I am dying. Can you come see me? 'MILLER.'

"I went down right away. He was dead. He had died there, alone, in his
filthy little hut, in that God-forsaken pueblo, ten miles from the
nearest white man, ten thousand miles from his home.

"I'll always remember our coming in. It was night. It had been raining
for thirty-six hours, and as we stepped into the unlighted hut, my
_muchacho_ and I, right away the floor grew sticky and slimy with the
mud on our feet, and as we groped about blindly, we seemed ankle-deep in
something greasy an